Transaction cards, or stored value cards, such as pre-paid phone services, general purpose, reloadable credit/debit cards, including open loop and closed loop prepaid cards, and the like, have become popular gifts. Stored value cards typically comprise a certain cash equivalent value that is encoded upon a magnetic strip applied to the surface of the card. This stored value may be determined by the vendor prior to packaging and display for sale or is selected at the point of sale by the purchaser and loaded by the cashier using a magnetic card reader/writer. Holders for stored value cards have been used both to simply store stored value cards and to provide a surface for decorative indicia and graphics, as well as personalized or preprinted text.
Stored value cards are typically displayed in a retail outlet in their non-activated (i.e., blank) form, and only activated manually at a point-of-sale (POS) terminal of the retail outlet. Nevertheless, this manual process may be relatively costly and time consuming to the retail outlet in that manual intervention is required. Additionally, sales of these stored value cards may be encumbered due to a substantial separation between a purchase decision by the consumer and the actual purchase of these stored value cards. What is needed is a system that provides for automated activation of stored value cards at or close to a point of purchase decision point where the stored value cards are displayed.